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Haskell's two primary case studies for presenting this opinion are in his titles, "The Curious Persistence of Rights Talk in an Age of Interpretation" and "Justifying Academic Freedom in the Era of Power/Knowledge." In both cases, Haskell defends nonuniversal, pragmatic standards of truth and morality as a way of maintaining liberal standards of "right" and unfettered academic inquiry. This defense involves response to what he treats as a rear-guard action and a frontal assault. The rear-guard action is the claim of moral absolutists like Strauss that any concession to historicism is fatal to real truth and genuine morality. The frontal assault, to which Haskell devotes his greatest energy, comes from the postmodernisms represented in various forms by Rorty, Fish, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hans Kellner, and the like. From Foucault, Haskell draws the neologism "Power/Knowledge" to de fine what he considers the profoundly menacing assault on academic freedom mounted by constructivist ideology.
Haskell brought his moderate historicism to bear most directly on history-writing in the essay for which the book is titled, a lengthy assessment of Peter Novick's volume from 1988, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" in the American Historical Profession. In this remarkable book, Novick painstakingly exposed what he regarded as a devastating contradiction between statements made by the founders and major figures of professional historical study in the United States in praise of "objectivity," and their ongoing, persistent, and even duplicitous advocacy on behalf of all sorts of political, ethnic, ideological, and institutional causes. Novick's own conclusions moved in a postmodernist direction by asserting that such a massive contradiction showed how self-deluding high ideals of objective historical truth actually were.
In response, Haskell tries to show that Novick's own work in researching and narrating the contradiction was the best possible proof, not for Novick's stated skepticism, but for Haskell's own "moderate historicism." In other words, even if famous historians have been swayed by their interests, that means only that the search for historical truth in which they are engaged is always in need of reform, improvement, and clarification. It does not mean that if historians fall short of "neutrality," they cannot still pursue "objectivity." Haskell describes quite clearly the kind of objectivity that he feels does, and must, survive: "that vital minimum of ascetic self-discipline that enables a person to do such things as abandon wishful thinking, assimilate bad news, discard pleasing interpretations that cannot pass elementary tests of evidence and logic, and, most important of all, suspend or bracket one's own perceptions long enough to enter sympathetically into the alien and possibly repugnant perspectives of rival thinkers." It is indeed a noble ideal.
But does it really work? Haskell's arguments in Objectivity Is Not Neutrality are a direct stimulus for Christian reflection. He has given up on the notion of Truth arising from permanent Reality. Although he does not bother to argue the case explicitly here, the notion of a divinely revealed standard of Truth equally applicable in all times and places would almost certainly be just as unacceptable to Haskell as the Platonic or Straussian Realism he respectfully rejects. At the same time, he makes a heroic effort to show that giving up such foundations does not necessarily mean an embrace of postmodernist relativism. Christian believers who think that doing away with such foundations leads irresistibly to the abyss will almost certainly have as much to ponder from Haskell, who thinks one can maintain morality and the rule of law pragmatically, without metaphysical foundations, as from Haskell's Nietzschean opponents, who—at least when framing this issue—agree with the Christian absolutists. Except, of course, that what Christian absolutists read as "descending into the abyss" becomes for the Nietzscheans "emerging into a mature human condition."
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